Gearing up for the digital workforce

‘The machines are coming’. Five years back, this could be a teaser tagline for a sci-fi movie. Now, it is a newspaper headline reflecting an impending reality. Only, this one doesn’t spell doom – as some might want you to believe– but rather another step in the automation journey that has taken enterprises forward in the last few decades.

Evolution of Digital Workforce For enterprises, evolution of digital beyond SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) to mainstream adoption of IoT, robotics, AI, and next generation digital platforms, offers opportunities that couldn’t even be imagined previously. Automation is moving from hardcore enterprise applications to a broad-based orchestration of enterprise resources. These resources span across people, processes, systems and things – within the enterprise and also outside of it.

This is where an unprecedented opportunity to tap digital workforce as another resource is created.

This digital workforce comprises multiple forms of mimicking and augmenting the traditional human workforce. Robotics, albeit not new conceptually, has become mainstream in replacing physical human tasks (a.k.a blue collar in traditional terms) that are repetitive in nature. Similarly, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is augmenting or mimicking the mundane and repetitive white collar, or knowledge worker activities. IoT offers the opportunity to tap multitude of data hitherto hidden within machines, providing the opportunity to monitor, control and orchestrate them better in the broader spectrum of processes. Machine language and AI are slowly becoming a viable alternative to human intelligence in many areas. Then we have digital sensing, which lends responsiveness and context to the customer engagement workforce.